Honestly I'm more annoyed by the rootkit "anti-cheat" the game uses, than this Sony action. It's easy enough to make a burner email account for Sony, and for better or worse, I'm not in one of the countries impacted.

They DEFINITELY need to refund all players that are from newly blocked countries - anything short of a full refund is unacceptable, but it's not like people have cared that PSN is unavailable in Nigeria before this point.

All that said, I love seeing the community putting Sony's feet on the fire for implementing even mildly anti-consumer BS. I just wish the outrage was more consistent

Right? This game requires users install a kernel-level anti-cheat in order to run. That's a huge privacy and security risk just to play a non-competitive video game. Nobody seemed to care about that, but signing up for PlayStation Network? That's where gamers draw the line!

I mean, I'm glad they're finally pushing back against terrible corporate decisions but what set them off is puzzling.

I think it's because PC gamers are often anti console so having to sign up to PSN and you don't even own a PlayStation feels very wrong.

It's a branding issue. If they required you to have an "Arrowhead Network" account login no-one would bat an eye... Even if it was just rebadged PSN.

oh, my God.... the gamers... are rising up.....

Yeah compared to rootkits, micro transactions, unfinished games at launch, publisher launchers, seems there's no shortage of things to whinge about in the current gaming space.

This game has a couple of those things but generally has been the best co-op shooting experience since Left for Dead 2 to me. Helldivers 1 was a blast too though.

I feel like the level of whiplash this game is getting is similar to that of Cyberpunk but I could be exaggerating. If the game wasn't so successful at checking people's boxes at the outset, I think we wouldn't be having this discussion today. It being so popular is why there are a ton of people freaking out. I'm not saying it's not warranted, just observing.

Needless to say, Sony is never going to allow an account linking grace period in any of their games going forward. It looks like they gave the kids candy and then took it away, better for them to just not give the candy in the first place.

Edit to add: I also find it hard to stomach the amount of ire to some degree because the creative devs had nothing to do with this and clearly put a ton of energy and love into the game. They even have a unique connection to the community through the bespoke game master, Joel. I'm pretty torn about it: I want the gaming industry to stop this full speed charge toward enshittification like, literally, every other aspect of life now. But I don't want developers to have to not only worry about mass layoffs and internal industry enshittification on top of reactionary blowback from the people they make the games for.

I will say I have the luxury of living in a country that's supported by PSN and already have an account, so it colors my opinions.

For me personally, it just got to me that Sony gave negative shits while Arrowhead was fighting an uphill battle getting their game playable in the face of overnight success, and now that everything is great and the hard work is done, Sony's seeing dollar signs and pushing their fucking corpo bullshit on a studio that sees zero benefit and suffers all the fallout. They're all too happy to shit where Arrowhead eats and it pisses me off.